The creativity, innovation and entrepreneurship lessons Tina Seelig imparts in “What I Wish I Knew When I Was 20: A Crash Course for Making Your Place In The World” are born from her own fascinating background (medical school, business consultant, founder of a technology company, associate professor, and mother), from her experiences teaching at Stanford, and from working with and interviewing some of the most brilliant minds in the country. But the take-aways are for everyone.
Essentially, Seelig is the professor you always wish you had and this book is an invitation into her office hours. You’d be crazy not to accept.
As many of us are learning these days, to turn bad times into good times sometimes we have to reinvent ourselves, make something out of nothing, or fail in order to eventually succeed. Seelig gives us basic tools to do all of the above, and more.
As an example of innovation and thinking beyond our limitations, she highlights how she challenges her students to make value out of seemingly mundane objects like post-it notes and paper clips, and how they achieve it. She shares the secret sauce of Silicon Valley, “fail fast and often” and underscores the lessons to be learned from failure. But mostly, she inspires us to think creatively and to push boundaries.
Whether you want to become a successful entrepreneur, or simply be challenged to think in new ways, this book has something for you, in good times or bad. My hunch however is that we’re more prone to absorb these lessons–and to take them to heart and put them into action–in the tough times. And it doesn’t hurt that Seelig’s enthusiasm for business and life in general is contagious.
This is a timely post … was just assigned to write a Mother’s Day newspaper piece along the lines of: “How I’d do things differently, if I could, in the early days of my motherhood….”
There have been so many times I’ve wished I could go back and talk to my younger, insecure self!
Cindy, thanks for your feedback. Tina might be a great subject for your Mother’s Day piece. The book actually published the week of her son’s 20th birthday and as such is very much a letter to him (and it is dedicated to him). Let us know if you’re interested in talking to her.
I will definitely check out the book for possible inclusion — but my interviews and quotes are limited to suburban Detroit moms, since that’s the audience for the local daily I’m writing for in this case. In the future, though, I might seek her out for one of my “Midpoint” columns, as these run online and have a much wider audience.